I reassess the famous arguments of Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1925) against the tenability of the distinction between particulars and universals and discuss their recent elaboration by Fraser MacBride. I argue that Ramsey’s argument is ambiguous between kinds and properties and that his sceptical worries can be resolved once this distinction is taken into account. A crucial role in this dissolution is a notion of what is essential to a property. I close by some epistemological considerations. 1 Ramsey’s challenge Frank Plumpton Ramsey argued in 1925 that “the whole theory of particulars and universals is due to mistaking for a fundamental characteristic of reality what is merely a characteristic of language” (Ramsey 1925: 13,405). In this paper, I want to reassess his arguments and the arguments of others to the same effect, elaborate their criticism of the traditional distinction between particulars and universals and see how much of it can be salvaged. Quickly dismissing alleged differences between universals and particulars of a physical or psychological sort, Ramsey first undercuts the most obvious way of finding a ‘logical’ difference, namely the contention that particulars must, whereas universals may or may not occur as the subject, as opposed to the predicate, of an atomic proposition. His argument to this effect is that Socrates is wise. (1)

Predicates without properties

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